Small groups? Don’t neglect mixing!
If you’re running a session where you need to get people into small groups, it can be tempting to let people organize themselves. After all, you’re probably dealing with other things — last minute doling out of supplies, locating instruction sheets optimally, or teeing up speakers. Maybe you give a vague suggestion to ‘mix it up’ or ‘look for people you don’t know well’.
So it may not be until you’re part way into your first activity that you notice you’ve got one all male (or all female) table, when you could have gotten a better mix. Or you may see all engineers at one table and marketers at the another.
Usually people don’t do this on purpose. But they have temptations — they happen to start chatting to someone in their own group who they haven’t seen in-person for a while, or they’re talking to familiar colleagues but it feels unfamiliar (or ‘fresh’) because of the offsite environment, or they’re just shy. For whatever reason, when you ask people to sit down at the tables, they’re not as mixed as you’d like.
That’s why it’s useful to give some advance thought to your ideal small groups and then come up with some instructions to guide participants in organizing themselves. You can ask them to aim for diverse groups, considering some or all of these criteria:
Gender
Experience (however you might want to define it: years at the company, number of projects run, how big their network is among stakeholders…)
Discipline or area of expertise
Department or organisation
You can even make a silly ‘tickbox exercise’ for them do at the table. They can ask each other, ‘OK, do we have anyone here from engineering?’ or ‘Do we have anyone here who’s been at the company for more than 5 years?’ Then ask people to shuffle based on the best balance they can get. If that feels too risky, make the checklist for yourself and apply it before you get started with the activities.
It seems like a small thing, but lack of mixing reduces the likelihood of new insights. Good mixing also helps people make new contacts and maybe even new friends, and everyone appreciates that. Think of it as ‘shaken and stirred.’
